Epistemological obstacle is a term associated with the French philsoopher Gaston Bachelard in The Formation of the Scientific Mind, who used it to describe false ideas that impede our progress in understanding the world. He was specifically referring to ideas — often analogies and metaphors — that persisted for extended periods in the history of science.
Computer “bugs” as epistemological obstacle
The famous computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra highlighted the (dead) metaphor of the programming “bug” in his On the cruelty of really teaching computing science:
We could, for instance, begin with cleaning up our language by no longer calling a bug a bug but by calling it an error. It is much more honest because it squarely puts the blame where it belongs, viz. with the programmer who made the error. The animistic metaphor of the bug that maliciously sneaked in while the programmer was not looking is intellectually dishonest as it disguises that the error is the programmer’s own creation. The nice thing of this simple change of vocabulary is that it has such a profound effect: while, before, a program with only one bug used to be “almost correct”, afterwards a program with an error is just “wrong” (because in error).
While the bug metaphor seems harmless, Dijkstra argues that it shapes the practitioner’s worldview in a pathological way.
Bugs are entities that spontaneously appear, often through no fault of our own.
In this way, the introduction of errors becomes naturalised and the expensive process of debugging becomes commonplace.